"I think human consciousness, is a tragic
misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of
nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural
law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion
of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are
each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for
our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand
into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw
deal."

Mi smo samo smrtne, mesnate marionete:

"People... I have seen the finale of thousands
of lives man. Young, old, each one was so sure of their realness. That their
sensory experience constituted a unique individual. Purpose, meaning. So
certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Truth wills out,
everybody sees once the strings are cut off all down."

“I have to admit that the results of these
considerations won’t amount to anything for anyone who ‘stands in life still
fresh and gay,’ as the songs says.”

—Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

Look at your body—

A painted puppet, a poor toy

Of jointed parts ready to collapse,

A diseased and suffering thing

With a head full of false imaginings.

—The
Dhammapada

The Thomas Ligotti SHOW

(The Cult of Ghoul MIX)

Excerpts from THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE

Schopenhauer wrote: “Let us for a moment imagine that the act of
procreation were not a necessity or accompanied by intense pleasure, but a
matter of pure rational deliberation; could then the human race really continue
to exist? Would not everyone rather feel so much sympathy for the coming generation
that he would prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate would not
like to assume in cold blood the responsibility of imposing on it such a
burden?”

Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why
nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously
extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally.
It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking
continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance
of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we
still doing in this horrible place?”

Contra Schopenhauer, Nietzsche not only took religious readings of
life seriously enough to deprecate them at great length, but was hellbent on
replacing them with a grander scheme of goal-oriented values and a sense of purpose
that, in the main, even nonbelievers seem to thirst for —some bombastic project
in which persons, whom he also took seriously, could lose (or find) themselves.
Key to Nietzsche’s popular success with atheist-amoralist folk is his
materialistic mysticism, a sleight of mind that makes the world’s
meaninglessness into something meaningful and transmogrifies fate into freedom
before our eyes.

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent putz
who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a born screw-up whose
seedy creation led the Gnostics to conceive of this genetic force as a
factory-second, low-budget divinity pretending to be the genuine article. They
trust in anything that verifies their importance as persons, tribes, societies,
and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an
afterworld that may be uncertain, unclear, or an out-and-out nightmare, but
which sates their appetite for values not of this earth—that depressing,
meaningless place they know so well and want nothing more than to obliterate
from their consciousness.

Newsflash: anyone who must receive instruction in morality will not
benefit from it. Those concerned with morality are not the ones who need
concern themselves with morality. The ones who need to be concerned with
morality are those who will never be concerned with morality.

Should the puzzle ever be put together, it would be the greatest
disaster in human history. To piece together a picture of things as they really
are in both the human and nonhuman world is not what anyone wants, for it would
be the end of us.

Utopias are ersatz heavens unsupported by any knowledge, logic, or
portents we have or can ever have. Life is suffering and the promise of a
future of non-killing jobs or a jobless leisure is but an inveiglement to keep
us turning on this infernal Ferris wheel of life, a booby prize when set beside
nonexistence. Pessimist conclusion: at all levels, the systems of life — from sociopolitical
systems to solar systems — are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY
USELESS.

Any killjoy will tell you: “If even one person’s life is a living
hell, then the world and any happiness within it is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”

The result is a being that is not what it believes itself to be, a
puppet that cannot realize its puppet nature. Everything in our world coils
around this grotesque misconception of ourselves. Our incompetence in seeing
through this misconception, these lies that perpetuate us, is the tragedy of humankind.

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people send their heads to
sunny places on the advice of a self-help evangelist. Not everyone can follow
their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which
it shines. Their only respite is in the unpositive. The best thing for them,
really the only thing, is a getaway into bleakness. Turning away from the
solicitations of hope and the turbulence they bring to the mind, sanctuary may
be petitioned in desolate places —a pile of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble
of words in a book wherein someone whispers in a dry voice, “I am here, too.”

What we call “evil” captivates us from childhood to old age, never
paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and
our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most
prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven. In a milieu
where there seemed no place for anything new, he invented evil... and has been
on our minds ever since. One thing about infamy — it is never boring.

A self-acclaimed “non-entity” in his own time, Lovecraft has enlarged
in stature since his death. This should not be taken as a sign that the world
has “caught up” with him. That is not the issue. Neither the public nor the
academic mind can embrace the consciousness of Lovecraft any more than it can
latch on to that of Schopenhauer or Cioran, much less Zapffe’s. None of these
writers portrayed a world acceptable to either average or distinguished heads,
not as long as those heads can believe in God or Humanity, not as long as they
are disgorging gospels of purpose and meaning and a future as vomitive as the
past.

The narrative parameters of The
Exorcist begin and end with the New Testament; those of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward could
only have been conceived by a fiction writer of the modern era, a time when it
had become safe not only to place humanity outside the center of the Creation
but to survey the universe itself as centerless and our species as only a
smudge of organic materials at the mercy of forces that know us not (as it is
in the real world).

The works of both writers (Lovecraft and Poe) have been hooted down
for what appears to their critics as bad writing, which translates as meaning
that they wrote with an emotional intensity and in a spirit of self-disclosure
that violated the rules of detachment to which professional authors largely
adhere. True, their prose styles are often high-strung to hysterical. This is not
untypical for solitary writers. It is also true that if they had not written as
they did, nobody would be reading them today. The possessed quality of their
writing is precisely why their works have lasted.

In one of his plentiful moments of fulgurant clarity, Schopenhauer spelled
out why he thought that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite
woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the
whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely,
and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.” The lesson is
a straightforward one: everything in
this life is more trouble than it is worth.

No one in a productive society wants you to know there are ways of
looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects that drugs
may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works
of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals
explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically
solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads
around them have become habituated. Drawn to peruse further that small library
of the hopeless, the futureless, they may happen upon minds whose soundings
into certain depths of thought immediately become indispensable to their
existence. Some may fall to their knees to hear a voice other than theirs
execrating this planet as a nightmarish penitentiary, not excusing its dust as
that of a dreamy paradise in the making. By these words they have been
confirmed.

The tolerance that we, the people, have for submitting ourselves to a
life of toil gives one a sense of why the rulers of this world have such
contempt for us and enact their villainies whenever the mood strikes them.

The game is to get the smalltimers to identify with the big-time players,
those for whom the lines between money and power have become blurred. This is
an elementary con, since on the whole people are only too willing to believe
they have a fair stake in the game. (A government-run lottery, which everyone
knows as a “stupidity tax,” is proof against arguments to the contrary.) Napoleon
referred to his troops as “cannon fodder,” but you can be sure that they spoke well
of him, because by doing so they believed they were speaking well of themselves
as the sidekicks of a Great Man. Such minds are convinced that they are part of
a greater cause than any to which they could aspire on their own. They will
argue for it, they will kill for it, and they will die for it. All they require
is a paper-thin slice of a humongous pie, a walk-on role in a historical epic,
and a few shares of common stock in Project Immortality and Sons, Inc. They
will never be allowed or allow themselves to understand the real workings of
the system.

Prospective parents may indeed be ogres, but it is too ghastly to
contemplate that anyone consciously enters a new vertebrate into the rat race
with the idea that its life will be preponderantly an unhappy one. Its death, a
cheerless certainty, is another matter. None may plead ignorance on that score.
Then how do they do it? How are people able to look their children in the eye
without flinching? How is it that they are not haunted by remorse for
embroiling them in this high-volume business of putrefying bodies?

But some individuals do not care for the evening news, viewing it is
as a ticker tape of fragments and abstracts from a world simmering in its own
stupidity. Real-life misery has no coherence to it, no vision to channel. As
Mark Twain said, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” Not every mortal
who owns a television wants to consume the raw data of the world any more than
they must. Instead, they would prefer to attend to the words of someone who
will stand up and say, “Life is just one damn thing after another” rather than
surrender their heads to some jackass of a news anchor who presents the day’s horror
as so many human interest stories and tearful installments of emotional pornography
because his corporate overlords figure they can use this kind of stuff to sell advertising
minutes. Everyone knows that this is the case. Everyone knows that this is an abomination.
And everyone, more or less, is hooked on it.

From the wallflower Brahma to the lame-brained Yahweh to a menagerie of
prime movers who spawned the earth and its denizens through unreasoning verve
or groaning defecation, Creators come off as a rather sorry bunch. Their
products are so shoddy that they are constantly dying out or blowing up or
breaking apart right out of the box. And their antics remind one of toddlers
who are playing with their toys one moment and smashing them the next. For pure
brainpower, Creators are unqualified to carry the deerstalker hat of Sherlock
Holmes, a construct that outshines any star set to explode in this spilt-milk
of a universe.

As luck would have it, Adam and Eve could no more choose not to do
what they did than they could choose not to choose not to choose. . . . And
their Master was no help, choosing to keep His own counsel about the booby
traps he had strung between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil. After they tripped the wire, He had his excuse to throw the
recalcitrant twosome out on their ear from Eden, so that they might become the first
family of a race of inbreds. As fall guys go, so they went. Lucifer, of course,
had inside information, being a longtime acquaintance of the Creator and
knowing full well what He was capable of. When paradise was lost, those two
people in the Garden of Eden played second fiddle to the Tempter, who also
upstaged his former boss and took over the puppet show. It is Lucifer, rather
than the Elohim —in singular, plural, or Trinitarian format — who would sustain
us, or rather sustain our imagination of ourselves. The Gnostics’ biggest
mistake was their attempt to rehabilitate this figure as one of truth and knowledge
in opposition to the Old Testament imposter, whom they disparaged as an evil demiurge.
Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most
convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully
realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because
we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of
lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil’s greatest
trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if
he did not exist, then neither would we. God may have created humanity in his
image, as the story goes, but we created the Evil One in ours. In a universe
that was already rife with built-in torments, Lucifer, following our lead,
chose to complement this standard hell with an optional one of his own making. God
was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no
one has yet written the obituary of the Devil. He must endure to represent us
to ourselves as the fiendish miscreations of this world—so tortured, so
deceiving, so real. He is the true hero of the race, and as long as we keep him
breathing, as long as we outrank him and any other beasts of our invention,
then we are the immortal, the deathless, the superior, if not literally then at
least in literature.

Having this knowledge, we could never be at home in nature. As beings
with consciousness, we were delivered into another world —the one that is not
natural. All around us were natural habitats, but within our every atom was the
chill of the unknown, the uncanny, the unearthly, and even the terrible and
fascinating mystery of the holy. Simply put: we are not from here. We move
among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads. But
our heads dwell in another place, a world apart where all the puppets are dead
in the midst of life.

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"Can you look around this world and believe in goodness of a god who rules it?! Famine, pestilence, slaughter, disease and death... They rule this world. If a god of love and life ever did exist, he's long since dead. Someone... Something... rules in his place..."-Prince Prospero-

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me man? Did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?-

Основни подаци о мени

Dejan Ognjanovic was born in Nis, Serbia, in 1973. He worked as a TA in American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Nis (1999-2009). Got his MA in 2009 ('Gothic Motifs in the Works of E. A. Poe') and his PhD in 2012 ('Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature'). Writes book and film reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine. In Serbia he has published 9 books: novels In Vivo (2003) and The Seducer (2014); three studies: Faustian Screen: The Devil in Cinema (2006), In the Hills, the Horrors: Serbian Horror Film (2007) and Poetics of Horror (2014), a collection of essays A Study in Terror (2008) and a book of interviews More than Truth (2017); and he edited H. P. Lovecraft's best stories (Nekronomikon, 2008.) and co-edited The New Frames (2008), on Serbian cinema. His essays were published in the books edited by Steven Schneider: 100 European Horror Films, 501 Movie Directors, 101 Horror / SF / Gangster / War Movies You Must See Before You Die, and also in Speaking of Monsters (2012) and Digital Nightmares (2015). He is an editor at Orfelin Publishing (Novi Sad, Serbia). His reviews in English can be found at Beyond Hollywood, Unrated and Quiet Earth.